Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Imagine if your reading habits at the library or bookstore were public record and advertisers used that information to hand you a cellphone application when you walked into Best Buy?Switch to the online arena and that's basically what's happening with Expedia's new PassportAds program, which I described here.Expedia and others inside and outside the travel industry are selling advertisers data from your Internet cookies, supposedly without any personally identifiable information, so marketers can more-effectively target you when you surf around to major travel and non-travel websites.When did our online travel buying habits become commodities? Probably quite some time ago, but now major websites, seeking new revenue streams, are accelerating the sale of information about your browsing habits.While Expedia's program is for ads to be posted on U.S. websites, international advertisers are getting involved in the program, and Expedia is mulling expanding PassportAds internationally.I don't mean to pick on Expedia. Other major websites are getting into this arena, too. It is a major trend in the advertising industry.The FTC proposed some guidelines on the behavioral-advertising issue. Among them, the FTC rightfully argues the cookie-sellers should prominently disclose these practices to consumers and not necessarily bury these disclosures within hard-to-fathom privacy policies.Expedia's partner in the venture, BlueKai, gives consumers the option of managing which of their buying preferences gets shared with advertisers or opting out altogether. I visited that page, and BlueKai knew, for instance, that I would be traveling in the next 7 to 14 days.As Expedia and other travel companies engage in bolstering their media programs by selling cookie data, at the very least they should explain their behavioral-advertising business on prime real estate, their home pages, and give unwitting consumers the option of withdrawing from these advertising programs.

1 comment:

Dennis, I only just saw this post, otherwise I would have linked to it when writing about Expedia this morning. This whole topic of sharing data across sites got me thinking about the white label business Expedia (and others) do with airline direct websites for hotels etc, and whether it could one day be used in some way that wasn't in the interests of those same airline clients.

Search This Blog

Subscribe via email

Dennis' Tweet Fest

My Tweets

About me

I've followed online travel, its twists, turns and detours, since the beginning (not Adam and Eve, but Rich and Terry), and will follow the aforesaid in this blog. I'm North America editor of Tnooz and I write USA Today's Digital Traveler column. Things not in my resume: I visited Orbitz headquarters pre-launch in 2000 and, left unattended, eavesdropped and examined the whiteboards to learn partnership details; Travelocity's ex-CEO Michelle Peluso credits me with her success (Wharton notwithstanding) after I wrote a sentence (with accompanying photo) mentioning that some of her Site59 women wore fishnet stockings and then airline execs kept the phone lines busy; I once drove to tiny Sherman, Conn., to see where PhoCusWright lives; and I was a nachtportier in a West Berlin hotel in the days (Btw) when a nasty wall split the city. Fyi, the previous stuff wasn't necessarily in chronological order.

My Diss-claimer

The opinions I express in the Dennis Schaal Blog are my own. Only I could think of this stuff. The opinions uttered or written here in no way reflect on the views of past employers, current partners, future associations (how could they anyway?) or my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Slayton. I don't have a lawyer, but if I had one, he or she probably would have told me to write something like this. Well, maybe not exactly. The Dennis Schaal Blog is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.